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Posts Tagged ‘Google Analytics’

Recap of the Google Analytics Partner Summit 2011

Published September 23rd, 2011 Analytics No Comments

As most of the world has heard already, SwellPath has recently been accepted into a very elite group of Google Analytics (GA) professionals.  SwellPath has recently become a Google Analytics Certified Partner (GACP).

 

What’s a GACP? 

Being a GACP means that Google has validated SwellPath’s work in regards to advance implementation of the solution, advanced analysis and very importantly a proven and effective process for engaging our customers and understanding how their business needs translate into web data, insights and areas for optimization.  As a member of the GACP, we now have access to new GA features that are in the testing phase, access to the GACP forum for shared QA among partners and the Google Analytics team and finally an invitation to the annual Google Analytics Partner Summit.

While the majority of the amazing improvements to the platform are not public yet and therefore confidential, we can’t mention specifics on new features or release dates.  GACPs got an inside look at demos of new features that will be rolled out to the public soon and others that are still in the testing phase.  The main takeaway from the new feature demos is that Google is really putting a lot of resources into improvements in data collection, speed, UI and data access.

What does this all mean? 

The gap between the large enterprise solutions and GA will be diminishing over time.  The new features will make GA an even more robust solution and narrow that gap where the current large enterprise solutions have the advantage.  SwellPath has helped clients migrate from enterprise solutions to GA and the “easy” part was building a custom tagging strategy that met the client’s needs and provided, at the very least, the same data collection as they were getting from their enterprise solution.  The big difference was in the UI and reporting options/features/visualizations that the enterprise solutions offered once the implementation was complete.  The enhancements to GA that are currently in the queue will meet or exceed what the other enterprise solutions offer.

So what does Google get out of this? 

Google does like to do things for “free” but why are they aggressively making improvements to GA that will help all of us non-paying GA users do our job?  The writing on the wall was there if you looked at it.  Deeper validation and attribution of ad spend and social media investment.  Can you hear a CMO asking what was our ROI for that $20k social media campaign?

At the Summit, Google showcased some amazing features of Android and Google+.  Why? The data is showing that social spend needs to be justified and therefore measured more precisely (PostRank acquisition) and the dramatic upward momentum in the mobile world is where more and more people will be connecting with the internet, maybe the majority in the near future…  With these massive changes in how and where people engage with the web you can either be reactive and roll out solutions to solve the tracking issues once they surface or proactive and develop a tool that will be prepared to incorporate the changes before they are occurring.  An example of this is the release of the Multi Channel Funnels report.  The data is there for everyone to see but are we even ready to use this data to drive our marketing mix strategy?  Maybe and maybe not quite yet.  Have CMO’s been asking us for the top multi-session funnel paths?  Providing inherent value to each user touch point across multiple sessions from multiple sources is a pretty advanced tactic to try and determine your perfect marketing mix. What it does do is provide more data to validate marketing spend across different ad space via the metric of “assisted conversions”.   BTW – Google makes money selling ads.

There are lots of exciting improvements and announcements coming down the pipe from Google Analytics.  Keep an eye out for some big announcements coming soon and new reporting features being rolled out in the near future.

The Converting Visitor – Uncovering the Secrets of a Successful Visit

Published April 6th, 2011 Analytics No Comments

Improving your site’s conversion rate is typically the main objective when it comes to website optimization.  Sometimes finding ways to improve the conversion rate can be an overwhelming task with no clear direction on where to start.  Recently, I have done a lot of work on trying to hone in on specific conversion events and finding some actionable insights that can really move the needle.  The same question comes up at the beginning of each project…where to start?

A great place to start is finding out what is currently working by focusing your analysis on the visitor segment that has converted.  By utilizing custom segments in Google Analytics, you can create a segment that only includes the visitors who converted on a specific conversion event and then apply that segment to various reports to work backwards all the way to the entrance point.  If your conversion event is broad, such as making a purchase on a retail site, you can narrow it down by adding additional qualifiers to your custom segment.  Once you have really defined your specific conversion segment, you can now apply this segment to multiple reports and paint a pretty robust picture of what a successful converting visit looks like.

 

 

 

 

 

*Build out the conversion segment in custom segments.

The first place to apply your custom segment is to your keyword report.  This is the first sign of visitor’s intent and, most likely, the conversion segment will use more specific keywords to find your site that may even contain some qualifier terms that are specifically related to the conversion event itself.  Pulling a large list of keywords from this segment is a great resource to use for your SEO and paid search strategy as well as copywriting when it comes to site content and the various call-to-action buttons and touts on the site.

 

 

 

 

*The above image shows the conversion segment applied to an Organic Keyword report in Google Analytics.

Mapping this segment to your entry pages report and content and pathing reports helps you determine what type of site content is of interest to your converting visitors.  This helps determine the conversion path from the site entry point all the way through to conversion rather than simply analyzing just the conversion funnel.  Often visitors will explore another area of the site that exists outside of the defined funnel and these key pages may be a good place to add a call-to-action to try and push more visitors into the conversion funnel.  Often there can be some pre-conversion research that happens on your site and applying this segment to the your content reports can help shed some light on where that activity occurs on your site.

 

 


*The above image shows the conversion segment applied to a Top Content report in Google Analytics.

Depending on the type of conversion event you are measuring against, another great place to apply this custom segment is to your other conversion events on the site.  In a perfect world, your visitors will complete one conversion event after another.  Obviously that is not always the case but you may get at least 2 conversions out of a single visitor and finding out which conversion events pair well together can help you entice visitors to continue to navigate the site after they have converted and potentially get that second conversion out of them.  This data can be used to adjust your “Thank You” page and add a link to drive visitors towards another conversion event.

Once you gain a clear picture of what a converting visitor looks like, you can then explore ways to expand your reach and target the appropriate channels to drive more visitors like this to your site.  By determining exactly how this visitors enter your site and what content they are consuming after they land on your site, you can find more places to entice these visitors to enter the conversion funnel and eventually see great improvements to your conversion rates.

2011 Web Analytics Conference Season Wrap-Up

Published March 18th, 2011 Analytics, Industry, News No Comments

March is a big month for conferences in digital, with South by Southwest Interactive taking up the lion’s share of the spotlight. For web analytics, it’s the conference month. All the major vendors have their user conferences, and eMetrics takes place in San Francisco. So, I thought it’d be good to provide a quick wrap-up on what went down this year, and what’s new with the major platforms.

Webtrends

The month kicked off  with Webtrends Engage in San Francisco. It was a fantastic event, with some top-notch speakers and sessions. Webtrends put the icing on the cake with the announcement of Webtrends Analytics 10. Justin Garrity, Webtrends Director of User Experience, summed it up with this quote: “We want analytics 10 to be the platform you can see all of your digital presence together in one view.”

The product features a much more “marketer-friendly” interface, and some awesome integrations with Twitter and Facebook data. Ultimately it allows marketers to monitor metrics for activity in these spaces, in conjunction with their own site metrics. One of the other new features that got me excited is integration with PostRank. A very valuable feature in my opinion. There’s a great video of Justin Garrity speaking about PostRank and other Webtrends Analytics 10 features of the product in this post on PostRank blog – definitely exciting to see what Webtrends and Justin have done to extend the platform beyond the boundaries of one’s own site.

Omniture

The second week of the month brought about the Omniture Summit. Always a big party, and maybe even more so with Adobe’s backing in the last several years. This year the Summit peaked with the announcement of new features and a new platform for Adobe Online Marketing Suite. The platform changes are a combination of more robust user interface, and supposedly a more scalable back end. The highlight of the new features is the release of Adobe SocialAnalytics. This new component of the suite promises heavily to help marketers capture the elusive social media ROI, and examine the effectiveness of social touch points in all parts of the customer life-cycle. Adobe has published a brief blog post on the features and capabilities of Adobe SocialAnalytics.

The other change that Adobe has made that should excite some agencies and others running larger traditional digital media buys, is the integration of more 3rd party partners into the suite. The new partners include demand side platforms, ad servers, and video networks. See the official press release for a complete list of the new partners for Adobe Online Marketing suite.

Google Analytics

Just yesterday, following on the heals of eMetrics, the first Google Analytics User Conference was held in San Francisco. Though not an “official” Google event, Phil Mui (Google Analytics Group Product Manager) spoke, and Google used the event to announce the release of Google Analytics v5.  Changes to the platform are a mix of cosmetic and functional. The cosmetic include a more streamlined interface, and changes to how reports are organized in the sidebar. The functional include some nice changes to what and how data can be displayed in dashboards; also moving toward the more marketer-friendly side of analytics. For analysts, the best two new features are the ability to use events for goals, and to use filters in custom reports. The first means that we no longer have to spoof pageviews to track goals that involve clicks or dynamic in-page events; thus avoiding inflated pageview numbers. The second means the ability to apply a filter to a custom report, and have it “saved”. This will save time, and allow for the automated export of more detailed custom reports. Here is a great video from Justin Cutroni highlighting some of the major features and changes in Google Analytics v5.

Other Analytics News

Some other analytics related news to come out of March included the release of comScore’s new analytics platform Digital Analytix. Besides creative use of the letter X, the platform also promises the ability to leverage some of the mountains of data that comScore collects, to provide analysts with a better understanding of who their audience is, and the reach of their campaigns. Definitely a platform we are excited to test and explore.

IBM’s more recent acquisitions in the analytics space are coming together, literally, in the form of Smarter Commerce. This new “suite” promises to provide businesses with a 360 degree view of their market and customer life-cycle. From some conversations I’ve had with folks in the industry, and IBM’s information on Smarter Commerce, this is now a very powerful business intelligence platform for companies with a major presence in digital commerce.

Overall, an very big month for digital analysts and those in the measurement space. Lots of focus on social this year; not as much focus on mobile as might be expected, but it was there. Besides the moves by the bigger players, lots of news being made by some of the up-and-comers in the social analytics and digital measurement space right now, and lots of buzz around some of those companies at SXSWi. 2011 certainly will be a busy and exciting year for digital measurement. Now get out there and measure something.

Add Google Analytics Data to Zoho CRM Lead Forms

Published February 16th, 2011 Analytics 8 Comments

I thought I’d earn some karma and put some instructions up for people who are interested in integrating Google Analytics data into their Zoho CRM Web-to-Lead forms. We were doing this with Salesforce, and since switching (back) to Zoho, we’ve updated the code to work with their system. Here are the steps and a link to the code at the bottom. Big thanks to Art Wells who wrote this jQuery code, and Justin Cutroni; I directed Art to his post on integrating Google Analytics with a CRM to make this happen

First step is to create the fields that will house the Google Analytics cookie data in Zoho. Navigate to Setup > Lead Settings > Fields List and create five new fields:

  • Google Analytics Source
  • Google Analytics Medium
  • Google Analytics Campaign
  • Google Analytics Keyword
  • Google Analytics Content

I set these all up as text fields, in the Description section (see below for how to create their own section), with a length of 100 just to be safe. I’m going to suppose you have a good knowledge of how these fields are used in Google Analytics. If you don’t then you can read up on campaign tracking in Google Analytics, and keep in mind that the source and medium values are used for referrals, organic search, and direct traffic also. Additionally, keyword is used for organic traffic. You’ll see an example later in this post.

With those setup, this next step is optional: I moved them all into their own section on the Lead page, called Google Analtyics data. This is all done in Setup > Lead Settings > Edit Page Layout. Pretty straightforward; setup the section and move the fields down there.

Now you need to get the values that Zoho is going to associate with these in the Web-to-Lead form. I’m assuming that you have a Web-to-Lead form setup and you are using it on your website. If not, you need to get that going; use Zoho’s support tools to figure that out. Moving along: go to your Web-to-Lead form in Setup > Lead Settings > Web-to-Lead Form and add these new fields into the form. Then get the source code.

Dump that code into a text editor, and find the 5 Google Analytics fields you created. They will have an input “name” of something like LEADCF8. You see how this value is configured: lead custom field and then a numeric value. Copy those field values and put them into Evernote or something.

Next, you’re going to take the script provided below and put it into your own .js file on your site. I can’t write code anymore, so don’t post a bunch of comments about how to use this. It’s in the jQuery on our site in swellpath.js. Dig up the file if you need to figure it out in detail. The screenshot shows you where the values from your Zoho Web-to-Lead form go.

Zoho Gooogle Analytics Source Script

Final step. Add this to each of the Web-to-Lead forms on your site, in the <form> tag:
class=’trackmaster’

This class is what triggers the script to add the hidden Google Analytics input values.

So, what do you get with all this? Check this screen shot out:

Zoho Google Analtyics Integration

This is from a test lead, where the term “swellpath marketing analytics portland” was used to find our site. Not much to add; I think the value in this is pretty clear for sites generating leads from these Zoho forms.

iHere is the JavaScript we are using. Enjoy using this!

Integrating Annotations into Google Analytics Reports

Published July 20th, 2010 Analytics 1 Comment

Fluctuations in website traffic can be caused by many factors.  Some are intentional marketing campaigns or optimization efforts and others are “outside” influences like news articles or competitive marketing campaigns.  I was recently asked to integrate some key events into trended campaign reports in Google Analytics.  Instead of having to go back through emails, news releases and other sources to gather important dates that influenced the client’s site traffic we pulled the information from Google Annotations.   You can incorporate any events, up o 160 characters, across all of your reports and add them as they are happening.  Another nice feature is the ability to make them visible to everyone or private to your login.

Annotations offer several helpful advantages:

  • Save time and effort searching for causes in data fluctuations
  • Incorporating offline marketing efforts into your reporting
  • Documenting key optimization dates

By utilizing the annotations feature, you can save valuable time digging through multiple reports trying to investigate the cause of a spike in traffic.  Websites can change frequently with content and design as well as the various marketing campaigns and media buys that drive traffic to the site.  The more data that you can incorporate into your annotations, the less time you will have to spend digging through reports or other sources to be able to explain major fluctuations in traffic.

Integrating the release of offline media campaigns into your annotations is a great way to bridge the gap of measuring offline marketing efforts through web analytics.  Insert an annotation on the date that your print ad was distributed and see how it influenced site traffic even if you can’t specifically segment that traffic out.

As media campaigns run over time, your web analytics application is generating valuable data on the quality of that traffic.  Certain ad campaigns will prove to be more successful than others and some campaigns simply need to be optimized to improve results.  Annotations are a great way to mark specific  dates of key optimization efforts.  You may notice an upward trend in paid search conversion rates but and can easily attribute optimization to that change by referencing your annotations.

This powerful and easy to use feature in Google Analytics is often overlooked but can save valuable time and effort if it is utilized.  Hopefully Google will continue to improve upon this feature by allowing you to group annotations by specific categories or allow you to insert an active link to a blog post or article directly into the annotation.

Swellpath Joins the Analysis Exchange

Published June 18th, 2010 Analytics 1 Comment

The Analysis Exchange was launched by Eric Peterson and Web Analytics Demystified as an opportunity to help grow the web analytics profession and offer career development opportunities to new web analytics professionals.  The concept of the Analysis Exchange is to pair a web analytics student with a professional web analytics mentor and to work on a project for non-profits or NGOs.  All parties benefit from the program and there is no monetary investment.

I held the student role when I completed the UBC Award of Achievement in Web Analytics program and now have the opportunity to provide mentorship to other students through the Analysis Exchange.  The UBC program is excellent however there is a gap between learning the concepts, techniques and best practices and actually getting the opportunity to apply your knowledge in the business world.  Companies are looking to hire analysts with professional experience and a track record of success so after completing the courses it is difficult to prove yourself as a new hire.  The Analysis Exchange offers a way to bridge that gap and provide students with that next step towards a career in web analytics.

Swellpath Interactive signed up as a mentor for the Analysis Exchange and was paired with a student and local Portland non-profit, Schoolhouse Supplies.  We collaborated with the student and Schoolhouse Supplies to define a project that was achievable to accomplish in the suggested 3 week time frame.  Based on an assessment of the website and of the current configuration of their Google Analytics account, it was decided that the final deliverable would be to build a weekly KPI report.  The report would then be built out into a PowerPoint deck to deliver on a weekly basis to Schoolhouse Supplies and include analysis of the data by the student.  In our particular case, the student works for Schoolhouse Supplies so they will be able to continue the reporting after the project development work is over.

Analysis Exchange Project - KPI Deck

Some issues that came up during the project were mostly focused around technical and development resources available in-house for Schoolhouse Supplies and configuration issues with Google Analytics.  These types of issues can occur in any business engagement as well so we just worked with the resources and functionality that we had.  Schoolhouse Supplies was taking its first steps towards analytics reporting so any data they can pull and report on was a step in the right direction.

The student that we worked with was very responsive and timely as I set forth action items and deadlines to keep the project moving.  The initial objective for the student was to define the goals of the website and then determine which of those goals were measurable within their current Google Analytics installation.   From there we moved on to develop the framework of the KPI report and created an analytics tagging guideline document to address the issues where we weren’t collecting the data we needed.  Fortunately, Schoolhouse Supplies has a developer on their Board of Directors to help with the tagging implementation.  The final deliverable is a PowerPoint presentation where the student includes an overview of the weekly data, trended graphs of the data with the student’s analysis and a slide of recommendations and action items for the Schoolhouse Supplies key stakeholders.

Analysis Exchange Project - Engagement Report

After the project is completed, each party evaluates the performance of everyone’s efforts.  Students will receive a score on their project work to help quantify their performance to help build their resume with real experience.  Each party can then move on to join another project.

This has been a great program to get involved with and a great concept to help further the web analytics profession.  Swellpath Interactive has been offering voluntary services to community non-profits over the years working with the United Way of the Columbia-Willamette and the Surfrider Foundation.  The Analysis Exchange is another great program for Swellpath to partner with and we encourage other analytics professionals, agencies and students to get involved.

Google Analytics Changes are Big Business

Published November 12th, 2009 Analytics No Comments

If you don’t know already, Google Analytics rolled out some major changes to the platform on October 20th – changes that push Google further up the ladder as a potential solution for enterprises looking to easily obtain actionable data from their web analytics programs. These changes come almost a year-to-the-day after Google rolled out significant changes in 2008, including advanced segmentation and custom reporting. This year, the features allow for even more detailed segmentation of visitors, and more advanced data analysis. Here’s a quick list of this year’s new features:

  • 20 Goals (up from 4) per profile
  • Engagement goals – for example: a visitor viewed 10 pages in their visit
  • Expanded mobile reporting, even for non-JavaScript enabled devices
  • Advanced filtering of reports, based on metric or dimensional conditions
  • Advanced custom variable tracking - you can now track 5 custom variables instead of just 1
  • Algorithmic driven intelligence, and automated alerts to make use of this intelligence
  • Sharing of custom reports and custom segments

There are facets of these changes that are significant in-and-of-themselves, and some other minor changes, but these listed are the major ones. I’m going to cover a couple of them below, and how they impact various business types.

Additional Goals Per Profile & Engagement Goals

Additional Goals - Google Analytics

Being able to track only 4 goals in a profile was incredibly confining and forced many businesses to have to create multiple profiles simply for tracking more than 4 goals. This leads to even more complexity if you’re using special filter-specific profiles along with your main profile. If you have 4 goals, and you have special SEO tracking profiles setup, and you’re filtering traffic for a certain region for another profile, you have 3 profiles to analyze. Creating a fifth goal would push you to needing 3 new profiles, for a total of 6 to analyze now!

Needless to say, the additional goals save analysts a fair amount of time in more complex analtyics accounts. Now goals exist in 4 groups of 5. This allows for more liberal use of goals, for things like views of a single critical page. In the past, to save goals, analyzing this would have been done by simply looking at the unique pageviews for the page. Now it can be added as a goal and more robust data can be looked at in conjunction with it’s occurrence.

Google has now added engagement goals also; which allow a goal to be created based on how many pages a visitor consumes in a visit, or their time on the site. This is extremely helpful for content focused sites (blogs, news sites, etc.) or communities where engagement is critical gauging success.

These features are live and active in all Google Analytics accounts already; go try them out!

Advanced Custom Variable Tracking

Prior to this change, only one custom variable could be tracked for each visitor on the site. This meant that if you were running a community site, where you had many segments of members that you wanted to see the unique behavior for, you could only use this one variable. So, you could use it for “male” and “female”, but not for age. Or you could use it for “19-25″, “26-35″, “36-45″, etc., but not gender. One way around this was to submit values like “male_19-25″ and then filter them in the reporting. Not a great solution, but that is all in the past now. Google now lets you use up to 5 custom variables. So our community site could use one for age, one for gender, and still have 3 left to work with.

In addition to the added volume for custom variables, users can now decide if a custom variable is visitor based, or session or page based. So, you can set a custom parameter for the session based on any activity, like posting on a wall. This would allow you to segment all reporting by visitors who had posted on their wall during a session. But couldn’t you track this with a goal? Yes, there are a couple of other ways you could gather data for this segment, but custom variables allow you to do it without creating pageviews (trackPageview) or events (trackEvent), making reporting “cleaner” in many cases.

This feature isn’t rolled out yet, but Google says it will be in “coming weeks”. It is expected by the end of November at the latest.

These features I’ve highlighted, and the examples I’ve given really are only the tip of the iceberg for how Google Analytics can now be used to report on segments of visitors. The ability to collect more visitor specific custom data and analyze activity based on it has been looked as one of the major differences between an advanced analytics platform like Omniture, and Google Analytics. While still not as robust as Omniture’s offering in this department, Google’s is a major step in that direction, and far easier to implement and use. It is exciting to see Google continue to push the other vendors, and the field of analytics as a whole. Just as exciting is it for analysts such as myself to be able to gather far-more advanced data from an easy-to-use and fast reporting application. Kudos to Google for pushing the product to a new level.

Segmentation and Custom Reporting Come to Google Analytics

Published November 15th, 2008 Analytics No Comments

ga-overview

Google Analytics has been the premiere free analytics solution for a few years now, but the landscape is changing. The purchase of IndexTools by Yahoo!, and the release of adCenter Analytics by Microsoft, have now threatened Google’s reign over this space. IndexTools in particular, has potential to be a very advanced analytics solution, for very little cost, if not completely free. The tools isn’t quite at the out-of-the-box Omniture or WebTrends offerings, but it is pretty close. All that is good discussion for a separate blog post, for now let’s focus on Google Analytics. In the last week or so, several enhancements to Google Analytics were introduced, two of them what I would consider major improvements to the product and major changes to the free analytics space.

The first change is the Overview interface. You now have a quick view of the performance of any Website Profiles in your account. It displays four metrics (Visits, Avg. Time on Site, Bounce Rate, Completed Goals) along with the id and URL of each of your sites, but the best feature is a percent delta column, which you can choose any of those four metrics for. So, as you can see in the screenshot, visits to the two sites has decreased in the last 30 days, and the big red arrow let’s me know this with a quick view.

google-analytics-advanced-segments

Moving onto the individual site data, the two glaring differences that I’ll focus on, are Advanced Segmentation and Custom Reporting. The Advanced Segmentation dropdown appears right in the upper left corner of the dashboard, the screenshot shows what it looks like when it is clicked on. I’ve created a custom segment called “Returning Visitors – Seattle”. Pretty self explanatory: it includes returning visitors from Settle.

google-analytics-new-returning-visitors

I won’t go into details on creating segments, but it is really easy, and like the new custom reporting interface, very Web 2.0 with drag-and-drop boxes. Besides the custom segments, there are also default segments, and you can add any of these into any report you are viewing. So on the fly, I can have my New vs. Returning Visitors report display Search Traffic, alongside the All Visits traffic (screenshot above). This facilitates measuring many comparisons and ratios, that used to require quite a few more steps and effort.

As previously mentioned, the Custom Reporting interface is slick and easy to use. You have the ability to add any metrics (columns) and dimensions (rows) you choose. One important feature, the system prevents you from creating invalid combinations of metrics and dimensions, something certain high priced analytics solutions often permit.

google-analytics-edit-custom-report

Finally, your reports can have multiple tabs, with separate metrics in them. So, in the report shown, I’ve created a tab for basic consumption metrics (page views, pages per visit, unique pageviews, etc.) and another for search metrics (visits with search, search depth, search exits, etc.). I can easily switch between the tabs, essentially packing two reports into one. The report itself is Visitor Type x City; it displays new vs. returning visitors by city.

There are several other minor enhancements to Google Analytics, but I’ll let you discover those on your own. The addition of segmentation and custom reports adds so much value to the package; it is a fantastic improvment for the hardcore GA users. Overall is great for the entire analytics space: it forces the paid solutions to further increase their value through their advanced features, and it also results in the free solutions catering to a larger and more sophisticated base of analytics users.

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